Interesting article!

The article is interesting in the sense that it is one of the few research that speak about the transmission of trade policy to the consumers, a question that monetary economist face all the time and trade policy seems to miss it. The article talks about a very interesting issue = how is trade policy transmitting to the end user? The back to school example with ski gloves is an interesting conjecture.

However, the evidence itself has raised two question for me:

1. How are prices still low despite of high tariffs??? This raises the question = are trade policies transmitting at all? Are consumers benefiting? Is there a trickle down effect to the consumer?

2. shouldn’t we go beyond collecting and comparing WTO MAN tariff and look at the effective rate of protection? For example, the diaper case where the effective rate of protection led to the identification of an inverted duty structure in the case of India.

I can only wish to be able to conduct this study on India for we seem to not have any information related to product prices at the HS level.